Abstract

Religious freedom has been thrust to the top of the political agenda in recent months. The violence in places like Nigeria has been on the front pages for some time, where sadly it continues (as Yakubu Joseph and Rainer Rothfuss describe in this issue in some detail). But in the industrial democracies - and now the United States in particular - religious freedom is becoming newsworthy as seldom before. President Obama's healthcare mandates have highlighted conflicts between religious freedom and personal behavior elsewhere in the developed world. We hope to explore this in a future issue, but it brings to a head trends that have been explored in this issue and other recent issues of IJRF.